Streets, if Not the Air, Clear Out as Delhi Tests Car Restrictions

Delhi on a smog-enveloped Monday morning, the fourth day of a two-week experiment to limit cars on roads in the region to fight pollution.CreditTsering Topgyal/Associated Press

By Nida Najar

Jan. 4, 2016

NEW DELHI — Traffic was flowing smoothly Monday morning on Outer Ring Road in South Delhi, usually jammed at that hour by subway construction and cars. An upscale market was dotted with free parking spaces. Monkeys ambled down one street in the colonial heart of the capital, easily dodging the few cars.

It was the fourth day of traffic restrictions imposed by the government of the metropolitan Delhi region, part of a series of measures meant to reduce pollution. The two-week experiment, which began on Friday, has been derided in many quarters of Delhi, where having a car and driver is a status symbol, and rush hour is usually a clamor of horn blowing, triple parking and bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Under the policy, private cars are allowed on the streets on alternate days depending on their final license plate numbers, with Sundays exempt. It calls for penalties of around $30 for scofflaws, and its success is to be gauged by daily pollution measurements. In 2014, a World Health Organization study ranked New Delhi’s air quality the worst of nearly 1,600 cities surveyed.

In a release issued last week, the Delhi government said that the traffic police and the divisional commissioner would deploy teams to 120 traffic points and that the Transport Department would check for overcharging and “misbehavior” by auto rickshaw drivers.

Skeptics questioned how the measure would be enforced. The Delhi regional government is run by the Aam Aadmi Party, and the police come under the federal government and its Bharatiya Janata Party. Arvind Kejriwal, the Delhi chief minister, has long clashed with the Delhi police.

But perhaps the most entrenched barrier is a Delhi elite used to having drivers standing by at all times. Some of those citizens, members of the capital’s upper classes, are up in arms about the change.

Promila Bij, 57, a South Delhi resident, swept into a taxi on Monday morning — the third she had called after two other companies said they had no cars. She arrived at work in West Delhi more than an hour late, she said later in a telephone interview, while her three cars and two drivers were sitting idle at home: All three have license plates ending in odd numbers, which were barred from the road on Monday. When she reached her office, where she works for a nongovernmental organization, she canceled meetings that regularly take her to the satellite city of Gurgaon and to central Delhi.

“I cannot come because I don’t have my driver or car,” she said. “If you want to call me snooty, all right, I am, because that is my lifestyle and that’s how I work.”

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A crowded subway station in New Delhi on Monday during a two-week experiment to reduce the number of cars to fight pollution.CreditTsering Topgyal/Associated Press

“You can’t say, ‘Change your lifestyle’ at the snap of a finger,” she added.

To accommodate the carless, the government said it would provide 3,000 extra buses. It took out newspaper advertisements, and the chief minister delivered a folksy radio spot on the measure.

“We are truly overwhelmed by the response we have received so far,” Mr. Kejriwal told reporters outside his home on Friday. “Delhi will show the way to the rest of the country.”

But it is not clear that Delhi’s experiment will actually reduce pollution, especially as the rules are riddled with exemptions.

Women are allowed to drive any car any time of day, seen as a nod to safety in a city where women face dangers on public transit. Two-wheelers — motorcycles and scooters, which experts say made up the majority of the nearly nine million vehicles on the road as of March in Delhi — are also exempt. Cars using compressed natural gas, and those belonging to senior government officials and judges, can be on the roads any day as well.

Ravinder Singh, a Delhi traffic police constable, said he had issued seven tickets since Friday, but the machine to issue tickets had broken in the morning. The excuses he heard from drivers breaking the rules were similar. Claims of medical emergencies — another exemption — were common.

“If it’s a genuine emergency, we can make it out from the face and tell if they’re lying,” he said. Out of 10 such excuses, he said he believed only two were genuine.

“This is New Delhi, where people will use all kinds of clout,” he said. “Everyone will say they know someone in government.”

Even as the government declared that the policy resulted in lower levels of particulate matter in the air on Friday compared with the same day last year, environmental experts cautioned that the effect would be limited. At noon on Monday, the air quality index measured by the United States Embassy reached 445, well into the “hazardous” level.

Delhi’s sources of pollution are varied, said Joshua S. Apte, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied Delhi’s air pollution since 2007. They include suspended particles from construction dust; emissions from vehicles, power plants and factories; and waste and crop burning in neighboring states. Estimates of how much vehicles contribute to total levels of P.M. 2.5, particulate matter that is considered the most dangerous because it penetrates deep into the lungs, range from 20 to 40 percent in Delhi, Dr. Apte said. Less than one-fifth of that comes from cars, according to a 2012 study.

Some Delhi residents approved of the move. Amit Bhandari, a graphic designer, waited patiently for the Metro in a South Delhi station. He began taking the Metro last week, in anticipation of the traffic changes, and said he thought that they should continue.

“We Delhi-ites are into showoff,” he said. “Bigger cars mean you are in a more elite class. That culture needs to go.”

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Streets, if Not the Air, Clear Out as Delhi Tests Car Restrictions. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe